Adoption Interview

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Hannah successfully made it through her first preschool class on Tuesday. It was only an hour long (tomorrow she goes the full two and half hours) and had only 6 of the 12 kids, but I still count it as a success. As far as I know she did not interact at all with any of the children, but there was only one episode of tears that lasted only briefly because another child became hysterical when his mother left so that at least was better than I had expected. There were no melt downs and no real crying. I also did surprisingly well leaving her. I think meeting with the teachers before school began and going over some of Hannah's special needs and how to best address them to make things easiest for everyone helped ease some of my fears. The teachers really seemed to be willing to do whatever it took to make Hannah successful. Hopefully tomorrow they will encourage her to have some interaction with the other kids.

In the last few weeks Hannah has had several full days with Daddy and has really enjoyed herself. Two weeks ago I went with Kristie, Chris, and Heather to Trader's Point Charity Horse Show. It was just like the good ole days when we used to go every year except for this year we all had serious photography equipment! It was a lot of fun, but VERY hot. Kyle and Hannah hung out and went to church and to play on the playground. Kyle was pretty exhausted when I got home! Last weekend I went to a town garage sale with Kristie and found some smoking deals on all sorts of stuff for Hannah. I got her a toy kitchen for only $10, some new puzzles, lots of books, and a beautiful wool winter dress coat that has barely even been worn for only $15. You can't get a cheap winter coat just to play outside with for that money at Walmart even! I was so proud of my bargain shopping. I love to get good deals. This time Kyle and Hannah had a jam packed day. They went to the playground, to open tumble at gymnastics, out to eat, and more playing on our swing set! Hannah was exhausted this time as well as Kyle! Today Hannah spent the day with Kyle again, but not nearly for as fun of reason. I've been having some pretty bad back pain for several months that has increased in intensity the past week. This morning when I woke up I could not even stand up. I had to call Kyle to come home from work and take me to the doctor and watch Hannah and help me to the bathroom and various other everyday tasks. Between toting me around to the doctor and to get x-rays, taking Hannah to gymnastics, taking care of all of Hannah and my needs and the daily household chores there wasn't much time for Hannah and Kyle to have a very good day. I would say no one in the Spontak house had a good day today. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Hannah has started another fun segment of her learning. She's begun to learn her address, phone number and birthday. She's mastered her birthday since that's the easiest and only needs a small prompt(the first 2 of the 4 numbers of our house number) to get her address. The phone number is slower in coming, but I think it's the hardest since it's all random numbers. She's got the last four digits and can sometimes get either the first three or the middle three along with the last four, but she's never gotten all 10 of them together by herself.

A funny story about Hannah happened last night. We took a walk to a small retention pond near our house to watch the ducks and muskrats. On the way there we saw some birds sitting on the power lines. After point out that the poles were "T"s Hannah got very excited when some of the birds flew away and swooped down pretty close to us. There was one bird left up on the wire and Hannah desperately wanted it to fly away too. She thought that we ought to be able to just command the bird to fly away for her, but of course this wasn't the case. After explaining that to her, Hannah all of a sudden stopped dead in her tracks, placed her hands in praying position, looked longingly up at the bird, and whispered "please" in the most pitiful voice we had ever heard. It was quite funny, but maybe you had to be there to get the full effect.

These pictures by the way are from July (I'm WAY behind in my photos!) when we went to see my sister and ride her horse Harley. Hannah had a blast riding Harley and even got to "jump" some poles on the ground. She thought that was pretty cool and even got up into two point. I even threw in a picture of me riding Harley and my cousin Becky too. Harley got quite the workout giving pony rides that day!

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Lately Hannah has turned into a little writing machine. Now that she's mastered the alphabet and begun to crack the code as far as reading she's moving on to another challenge-writing legibly. She's been able to write H for the longest time, but now she's not as interested in learning to write single letters-even ones she can't do yet. Now she wants to write WORDS. So far she can independently write CAT and HAT and is really close on writing her name. A 6 letter word is a bit daunting even if there are only 3 different letters! She can write many other words if you spell them for her, but cat and hat she knows how to spell and can write without any prompting. Lately her favorite single letter to write is E. It's her newest addition to her collection and the first letter in Evelyn's name so that makes it special I think. Here's a running count of the letters she can independently and legibly (about 80 percent of the time) write: A, C, E, F, H, I, L, N, O, Q, and T. She's getting really close to being about to do D, B, U, M, V, and X, but those letters aren't always legible if you didn't know what letter she was writing beforehand. She's also started to do some meaningful drawing although we don't always know what it is she's doing. The two coolest examples involved the use of her magnetic writing toy that she got from Kyle's aunt and uncle for Christmas. It has these little magnetic stamps in the shapes of animals. She took one of the stamps that is a duck and stamped it on the screen and then took the pencil and drew a circle around the duck. Then she turned to me and said, "The duck's in the pond." The other instance that really got me was when she was returning from Mamaw and Papaw's house one day. I was so shook up I had to call them right away to ask if they had taught her the skill or if she came up with it on her own. When we left my parent's house someone had drawn a smiley face on the toy and left if on there instead of erasing it. Hannah took the pencil and drew circles around the eyes and said, "Mommy, he's wearing glasses!"

Potty training is going VERY well. We've made the switch completely to big girl underwear during the day, even when we are out, except for naps. Hannah rarely has accidents anymore and I've stopped taking her to the bathroom except for when she tells me she had to go unless we are getting ready to get into the car. I've made a rule that we ALWAYS at least try to go pee before we leave home since there is no bathroom in the van! I am so thrilled to be rid of diapers. It is absolutely liberating to not have to worry about toting along tons of them or searching for sales on them at the store. However, now I have several packages of them leftover from sale expeditions that I have to figure out what to do with. I'm considering selling them on craigslist for a discounted price to get some of my investment back.

Going along with Hannah's independence in potty training, she had made several more steps towards becoming a big girl. She has given up sippy cups altogether except for car rides and independently washes her own hands after going to the bathroom as long as she can reach everything. One day she went to the bathroom by herself and once i heard her get off the toilet I went to check on her and she was "washing" her hands except she couldn't get the water turned on so she was just squirting more and more of her purple foamy soap on her hands. It was absolutely EVERYWHERE on the counter, sink, and cabinets.

In two weeks Hannah starts preschool. I'm very nervous about it. Hannah on the other hand is pumped. Everyday she asks if she has preschool. She's really excited about having a teacher. I'm not sure she quite realizes that there will be other kids there and the teachers won't be there solely to teach her stuff. Hopefully it all goes well and that she really learns how to interact with kids her age well.